My Open Source Wish List

Yeah, so speaking of CSG, would it be so hard for someone to implement addition on all the prims of an object before they go to render?

...and the server host might have a cat that pisses all over our server and destroys all our data!. Or an alien spaceship could abduct the server admin!. Then there's the problem of George Bush waking up in a bad mood one day and causing WWWIII to kick off. Nobody would even care about 3D meshes then!

What the hell was I thinking? Meshes would never work!

Huge open source wish:

- Simple mouselook movement controls to get around using WASD and mouse only, no camera control window needed

SL's movement and view controls are very painful for new people to figure out. The apparant total inability to freely mouselook is ridiculous. Just about every 3D-world game has had that capability for... 10 years now? Quake I, anyone?

WS to move forward/back
AD to strafe left/right
mouse left/right to rotate avatar and view
mouse up/down to look up/down
scroll wheel to zoom in/out

The Camera Controls window should really only be a last resort, for people building stuff that want to move the camera independant of their AV.

Though even so, there should just be a keyboard or menu toggle that permits WASD/mouse to move the camera only while leaving the AV motionless.

I don't find any need for the camera controls window for me - of course it needs to be available for those who use it.

If you click on your avatar, moving the mouse left and right makes you rotate and thus look left and right, and moving the mouse up and down makes you look up and down.

Shift left arrow and shirt right arrow make you strafe left and right.

With the chat bar turned off W and S make me walk forth and back.

Alt page up and alt page down make you look up and down. They seem backwards to me; I'd rather have the word up mean look up instead of move the camera so you look down, but such is life.

Ctrl alt up arrow and ctrl alt down arrow make you look down and up. Also seem backward to me.

Control alt shift plus an arrow key make you pan in the arrow direction.

I had no lengthy experience with a good 3D game to unlearn when I started SL, which helped.

At any rate control options would certainly be a good thing to have.

I think my current three favourites for Open Source are:

Bug fixes! Should be fairly self-explanatory
Better caching - not too out of this world either, looks like some developers are already right onto this one so I'm hopeful on this front already!

Interface Improvements
Probably the biggest one really in terms of overall work, and I expect one of the major features that LL was thinking of when they released as open-source.
Firstly; in an app like Photoshop you get a main-window, and little floater 'tool' windows. I'd like SL to work like that, with one big main-window (which can be made full-screen, preferably still being a window so it can be Exposéd on Mac OS X), when you open things like inventory, friends, IMs etc, they appear as floater windows within the main-screen area. But they can be moved wherever you like, a second monitor for example. Or you can resize your window to leave space at the side for inventory so you aren't covering anything up. On OS X you can then use Exposé to quickly sort through them, a HUGE boon to useability. There's also no reason you'd have to change the design, it'll probably be a bit of a bastard to properly apply them to OS specific windows, but it's doable. The reason I mention floater windows is, first of all they appear above main-windows by default, so behaviour isn't changed, but (on OS X anyway) they disappear when you switch to another app. This could be expanded though to allow 'permanent' windows for certain features, like IMs, which you may wish to still see when in another application, though on that, how difficult would it be to route chat to MSN, AIM, YIM, Jabber etc. via the client rather than waiting for LL to do it? Perhaps using a local Jabber server it could be done quite elegantly.

Additional to that is improvements on the whole, since the interface is XML driven it's entirely possible for the Open Source community to completely change the SL interface without breaking compatibility with other changes, since new features etc just need to provide new XML templates for the interface system to work with. Meaning we can get more attractive, or more functional interfaces to use. Such as a different way of managing inventory as was recently discussed.

My work in Java has shown me that interfaces are possibly more difficult than the actual programming of software, I'm fairly good at designing them in HTML, but come to an actual window and it can be very difficult to make a design a reality. I'm hoping some people with experience in interfaces on their respective OSes get involved for the 'floater windows' part.

Have the script editor not do the indent thing.

Right click a word in the script editor, have it display the wiki page in the F1 editor.

Spell check in chat entry.

Filter out and not display IM messages from the chat that scrolls up from the bottom of the screen.

Not show our balances in screenshots.

Turn on beacons for everyone in our friends list.

Be able to edit the fonts and colors of all interface elements separately.

Not render the underlying areas of overlapping interface elements, so you can make things like the IM windows translucent, and if they overlap something else translucent, only the topmost layer is rendered - so you can always have only one layer of translucent interface displayed over top of the world, allowing you to always be able to read the topmost, active interface element and still see the world through only one layer of translucent interface.

Ability to do calculations in entry fields.

Multi-line text entry for chat.

Add a single line in the chat history and IM windows that shows the most recently entered line of chat. Thus you can scroll back in the chat and leave it there without missing the latest incoming chat.

Allow us to have a different way of alerting us to IM chat messages other than having the tabs flash constantly and a shape changing orange neon tube flickering all the time.

Allow us the ability to permanently remove the Cheesy Beacon option so we don't ever have to even see the words Cheesy Beacon.

Ability to create a complete list of all Debug Settings, with comments, to a text file.

Ability to save our settings to a text file that will be preserved and usable following a complete uninstall and reinstall of SL.

Option to not have the scroll bar in inventory screw up where we are in the inventory if we drag something to the world and go across the scrollbar in the process.

Option to go back to old plain style pie menu that doesn't shrink or do gesture selection.

Ability to give people things by dragging to their names in the friends list.


Onscreen all the time draw distance selector.

Ability to split the screen into a World area and an Interface area.

Make the music and video controls not stick up on little tabs in the retarded way they do.

Icons for no-script, no-push, etc. that I can actually tell what are.

Inventory that has fields for item name, creator name, description, acquired date, etc. with full featured search including boolean searches, date ranges, etc.

Back up inventory to local file, including especially the names and UUID's of objects to help with locating and re-acquiring the stuff LL loses.

Ability to use the editor of choice, such as notepad, for script editing.

Controls over all the tooltips - I don't need a tooltip for the Build button, thanks, and I also don't need to be told ten millions time about Control [ and Control ].

Ability to check all objects the my computer knows about and see where mine are without having to use sensors or squint at the mini-map.

Ability to send email and transfer files to other users, with proper permissions, of course.

Multiple emails addresses in snapshots to send to more than one person or place at a time.

Ability to both send a snapshot and save a local file at same time.

Ability to name snapshots individually.

Bring back the old teleport beacon that goes down to the ground and is solid like God intended teleport beacons to be.

Underscores under the hot key indicators on the menus all the time.

For keyboard activation of menu items that start with the same letter, use multiple presses of the initial letter rather than some letter in the middle of the word that has no mnemonic value at all. I.E., for Recorder, do Alt C R R instead of Alt C O.

Cache the map terrain images and don't update them more than once a day. If I miss the appearance of new island that's fine, I wouldn't have noticed it anyway, and if I went there, guess what I'd see - more prims, more avatars, more linden trees. I can afford to be a bit out of date on such matters if it would mean the map would instantly show me what its got.

Do something to make the map icons be less annoying.

If someone has said something in chat range it needs to be able to point out where they are.

Read the keyboard in a way that allows use of the Iolo Macro Magic keyboard macro program.

Add" Stand Up and Fly" option so if you stand up when you are in the air you don't fall down.

Add "Land" feature so if you are flying you can click on a spot and the system will fly you to a graceful landing there. ( that sounds like it would take server code to do)

Abilty to save scrips, notecards, etc. and folders of them to local files.

Use normal windows style interface elements and DirectX instead of OpenGL.



That's enough for the moment.

From my point of view, one of the most important things to create from the Open Source client is a graphicless client. This would allow a messenger service to be operated using an avatar as a point of presence in the world. Only thing I can think of that's not blindingly obvious for it is the ability to have the avatar teleport to a preset location and sit on a predefined object when it gets there so that in-world visuals to go along with the chat can be more complex.

I'm seeing a lot of requests for native GUI elements, and DirectX support. I'll sound off in reverse order, just because.

SL uses OpenGL because it is, well, open. The specs are free and open. DirectX is a proprietary, closed, graphics API made by Microsoft.

SL is licensed under the GPL! Even if Linden shelled out the many thousands of dollars for a DirectX license, then tens of thousands of dollars programmer time to implement it, they'd have to relicense SL and drop the OSX and Linux clients.

DirectX support: Can't and won't happen. Stop asking.


Native GUI chat windows: Boy, that'd be nice. But, yet again, SL implements the interface in OpenGL. Implementing everything again in DPS, X, and the windows API would, yet again, cost tens of thousands of dollars and would be very fragile and bug ridden. The GUI doesn't crash now, not anymore, but it sure would start again if they tried to fork it to three different platforms. And then, instead of pushing a single GUI update for a single platform (OpenGL) you would have three, very different APIs, each with their own wacky hang ups. And this is assuming Linden wants to spend huge amounts of money on the Linux client! An idle glance at the Linux alpha client forum reveals maybe fifty users and a single Linden mod. Not much of a userbase to justify all that work. Might as drop Linux support for that particular feature.

And once you drop one platform-specific feature because it's too much of a hassle to support, you start dropping others, and then the client's useless and nobody uses it.

The same thing could (and would) happen to the OS X client.

Native GUI support: Can't and won't happen. Stop asking.

Already done, and way before they open sourced the client.

http://www.libsecondlife.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=8&sid=988326ba3fea9361913d4941e1bdc8a3

God bless libsecondlife!

Why are we talking about Linden Lab spending money in a thread that is about opensource third party development?

Anyway, back on topic. Native GUI functionality seems doable. The solution is to abstract the UI *functionality* from the UI *form* (this may already be the case). Then you have a plugin API which then you can insert your own UI forms into that take input, parse it, and feed it to the UI functionality interface and vice versa. Now instead of having some limited monolithic codebase, you have a set of user-supported UI form plugins (in addition to the default UI) and open the doors to new and innovative forms of user I/O.

I agree, Solar. Also, I predict we will see additional windows in clients, despite what bbot says. Isn't it possible to open more than one OpenGL window at a time? This is such a basically useful feature, someone will do it. I sure wish I could use my 2nd monitor for chat/IM windows. Sure, it wouldn't work for inventory when I want to drag & drop, fine.

Any popup should have a "tear off" button. Once torn off, it's a new window. Drag and drop no longer works, which is obvious because if you try you can't get there. So pop it back into main window when you want that.

Sure, there'd be bugs.

One might also want to put all their HUDs in a separate window, though I'm less sure about the feasibility there.

Is it meant to be linked in that forum somewhere? 'Cause I can't find it. Excellent news though.

Learjeff - it's not technically impossible to drag between windows, IIRC most OSs already have a framework for it.

the other evening I posted patches on the Jira to fix a few things in LSL. To be precise:

llOwnerSay((string)(a-1)); // Syntax error, because this is parsed as "a" followed by the number "-1"
llOwnerSay((string)(3-2)); // Prints "3" because this is parsed at the number "3-4", that is "3" followed by some ignored non-numeric trash.
llOwnerSay((string)(3E+-2)); // prints "3" because this is parsed as the number "3E+-2", again, "3" followed by some ignored non-numeric trash.

It's quite likely that there is some broken code out there that compiles successfully and produces incorrect results because of this bug.

If they're accepted by Babbage Linden, they will also allow integer constant expressions in a global context, because this bug seems to be the result of an attempt to allow negative numbers in a global context. I'm looking to make floating constant expressions work as well.